A very important part of the development process is to provide help functionality to the user wherever possible. Most developers tend to delay this, but you should remember that a normal user isn't necessarily a Unix expert. He may come from the the dark side of computer software usage offering all sweets that a user may need to work himself into using an application even without ever touching the manuals. Therefore, the KDE and Qt library provide all means usually considered making an application professional in the eyes of the normal user by help functions that are ready to use. Within the application, those are:

Additionally, the application should provide means to access a HTML-based online manual directly using the standard help key F1. This context based help system is provided automatically through the KMainWindow class, though as the author you must provide the content.

As KDevelop also offers all types of help as well as the KDE framework generated by the application wizard already contains support for this, this chapter will help you find out where and how to add your help functionality.

During the development of your application you should try to be consistent whatever you're doing; therefore you should do the necessary steps directly while extending the code. This will prevent you from diving into the code again and figuring out what your application does or what you intended by certain parts of the code.